Virginia's First Africans

Virginia's first Africans
arrived at Point Comfort, on the James
River, late in August 1619. There, "20. and odd Negroes" from the English
ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food and some were
transported to Jamestown,
where they were sold again, likely into slavery. Historians have long believed these
Africans to have come to Virginia from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest
they had been captured in the Portuguese colony of Angola, in West Central Africa.
They probably were Kimbundu-speaking people from the kingdom of Ndongo, and many of
them may have been urban dwellers with some knowledge of Christianity. While aboard
the São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by
the White Lion and another English ship, the Treasurer. Once in
Virginia, they were dispersed throughout the colony. The number of Virginia's
Africans increased to thirty-two by 1620, but then dropped sharply by 1624, likely
because of the effects of disease and the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–1632).
Evidence suggests that many were baptized and took Christian names, and some, like
Anthony and Mary Johnson, won their freedom and bought land. By
1628, after a shipload of about 100 Angolans was sold in Virginia, the Africans'
population jumped dramatically. Meanwhile, their experience in West Central Africa
cultivating tobacco contributed
greatly to the crop's success in the colony. MORE...

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Arrival

Sometime in 1619, the Portuguese slave ship
São João Bautista left the port city of São Paulo de
Loanda in Portugal's West Central African colony of Angola and sailed for Vera
Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico). The captain, Manuel Mendes da Cunha, carried
with him 350 African slaves, 200 of whom were part of an asiento, or contract, with a slave dealer in Seville. When da Cunha
arrived at Vera Cruz on August 30, however, he delivered only 147 slaves,
including, according to Spanish records, twenty-four African boys who he at some
point sold in Jamaica. Those same records indicate that da Cunha had been robbed
off the coast of Campeche (also in present-day Mexico) by "English corsairs," or
privateers.

Those privateers were likely two ships. The White Lion
sailed out of the port of Vlissingen (Flushing), Holland, and its captain, John
Colyn Jope, bore a Dutch letter of marque, paperwork that allowed him, as a
civilian, to attack and plunder Spanish ships. The English Treasurer also sailed out of Flushing and was partly owned by Virginia's
deputy governor,
Samuel Argall. (In 1612,
Argall had sailed the Treasurer on what at the time was the
fastest-ever voyage from England to Virginia. In 1616, the ship delivered Pocahontas to England.) Its
captain, Daniel Elfrith, also bore a letter of marque, his on the authority of
Charles Emmanuel I, duke of Savoy, an independent duchy whose land has since been
subsumed by present-day France and Italy. Working as a "consort," the two ships
attacked the São João Bautista late in July or early in
August 1619 and apparently robbed da Cunha of about 50 of his African slaves. (A
large portion of the ship's Africans, perhaps as many as 150, probably died during
the Atlantic crossing.)

The White Lion and
the Treasurer immediately set sail for Virginia, where they
hoped to sell their cargo. According to a letter written by the colony's
secretary, John Rolfe, to the
Virginia Company of
London treasurer, Sir
Edwin Sandys, the White Lion arrived first and
landed at Point Comfort sometime late in August, having lost its "consort shipp"
on the passage from the West Indies. Rolfe mistakenly described the ship as a
"Dutch man of Warr," perhaps because it bore a Dutch letter of marque. "He brought
not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes," Rolfe wrote, which the governor, Argall's
successor Sir George
Yeardley, and the cape merchant, Abraham Peirsey, "bought for victualle [food] …
at the best and easyest rate they could." Some (or perhaps all) of the Africans
were then transported to Jamestown and sold.

The Treasurer arrived at Point Comfort three or four days
later carrying between twenty-five and twenty-nine additional slaves. Although he
apparently managed to sell some of his slaves, Captain Elfrith found that the
residents of Kecoughtan
(present-day Hampton) refused to
sell supplies to him or his crew, perhaps because port officials knew that his
letter of marque from the duke of Savoy was no longer valid. The duke had made
peace with Spain, which meant that Captain Elfrith now could be accused of piracy,
a legal complication the Virginia merchants may have wanted to avoid. Elfrith
might have heard that Governor Yeardley had sent Secretary Rolfe, Lieutenant William Peirce, and a Mr.
Ewens (probably William Ewens) to meet the Treasurer, and
decided that he had better leave. Whatever the case, he was gone by the time the
Virginia men arrived.

Elfrith sailed to the English colony at
Bermuda, where, for 50,000 ears
of corn, he sold fourteen of his Africans to acting governor Miles Kendall and his
successor, Nathaniel Butler. Butler later told a superior that if not for the
Africans, he would not have been able "to rayse one pound of Tobacco this year" to
generate revenue. He added that "Thes[e] Slaves are the most proper and cheape
instruments for this plantation."

Origins

The discovery by the historian Engel Sluiter of Spanish records linking the slaves
sold in Virginia to the attack on the São João Bautista
discredits earlier theories that the Africans had been bought in the Americas for
resale. Instead, following the research of John K. Thornton, Virginia's first
Africans may have been enslaved in the kingdom of Kongo, north of Angola; in territory to Angola's east; or in the region
south of Angola, across the Kwanza River, where the Portuguese had been buying
slaves since late in the sixteenth century. Most likely, though, they were
captured from the nearby kingdom of Ndongo, where in 1618 and 1619 the governor of
Angola, Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos, fighting alongside a ruthless African
mercenary group called the Imbangala, led two campaigns against the kingdom's
Kimbundu-speaking people. Thousands were captured and likely provided the cargo
for six Portuguese slave ships from Angola that arrived in Vera Cruz between June
18, 1619, and June 21, 1620.

The Ndongo people lived in densely populated cities—in 1564 the city of Angoleme
seems to have had 20,000 to 30,000 residents living in 5,000 to 6,000 thatched
houses—interspersed with rural areas where farmers tended livestock and raised
crops such as millet and sorghum. As such, Ndongos did not fit what Thornton has
called "the stereotyped, parochial image of Africans from precolonial villages."
They may even have been Christians; many in the kingdom attended Mass conducted by
Jesuit priests, and the Portuguese required that all slaves be baptized before
they arrived in America.

In the decades that followed, most slaves
arriving in Virginia through the Portuguese slave trade were captured not by the
Portuguese but by other Africans who sold them to the Europeans at markets. As a
result, slaves suffering through the Middle Passage often hailed from different
regions and villages, spoke different languages, and abided by different social,
political, and religious customs. The Ndongos, by contrast, were captured more or
less directly by the Portuguese and shared with one another a complex ethnic
identity.

That they also may have been Christians is, perhaps, ironic. A Virginia law,
passed in 1670, defined as slaves-for-life all non-Christian servants brought to the
colony "by shipping." Such servants were, almost without exception, Africans,
suggesting an assumption on the part of lawmakers that Africans were, by
definition, non-Christians. The law already precluded freedom through conversion,
and in 1682 it expanded its description of slaves-for-life to include all
non-Christian servants (in other words, Virginia Indians who were imported into
the colony, in addition to Africans). In this way, Christianity served as an early
stand-in for racial identification.

In the Colony

Virginia's first muster, or census, was compiled in March 1620, at which time the
population included 892 Europeans and, among "Others not Christians in the Service
of the English," four Indians and thirty-two Africans. Fifteen of the Africans
were male and seventeen were female. Although it is uncertain where the Africans
lived, some probably resided at Jamestown in the households of Sir George Yeardley
and Captain William Peirce, both of whom later were credited with having black
servants.

By 1624, when the next muster was
compiled, Virginia's African population had dropped to twenty-one. Some of the
Africans probably had succumbed to the so-called seasoning process, whereby summertime diseases killed
a majority of new residents during the colony's first few decades. For this
reason, Virginia leaders periodically requested that ships carrying new servants
arrive during the winter months, as opposed to August, when the White Lion landed. This allowed newcomers time to build up immunity
before summer. Research by Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman suggests that,
even before their arrival in Virginia, the Africans may have been carrying Plasmodium falciparum, a blood parasite that transmits a
virulent form of malaria. Their close contact with the European slave traders
likely exposed them to other unfamiliar parasites and infectious diseases, and
they would have been susceptible to the various agues and fevers common to the
Chesapeake Bay region.
And those Africans who did not die of disease may have died on March 22, 1622,
when Virginia Indians led by Opechancanough attacked European settlements, killing as many as a
quarter of the colony's inhabitants.

Some of the twenty-one Africans listed in the 1624 muster had European names,
suggesting that they had been baptized. This could have occurred prior to their
leaving Africa, while they were in the Caribbean, or after they reached Virginia.
Four of the eleven Africans living at Flowerdew Hundred—a plantation on the upper reaches of the James River that leading
merchant Abraham Peirsey had purchased from Governor Yeardley—were identified by
name: Anthony, William, John, and another Anthony. Three Africans resided at
Jamestown, but only one was listed by name: a woman named Angelo belonging to
William Peirce. An African named Edward lived in the Neck O'Land, the mainland
behind Jamestown, and was part of the household headed by Richard Kingsmill, guardian of the late Reverend Richard Bucke's
children. Peter, Antonio, Frances, and Margaret resided on the lower side of the
James River at the PuritanEdward Bennett's plantation
near the former Indian town of Warraskoyack, while Anthony and Isabella were
members of Captain William
Tucker's household in Elizabeth City (formerly Kecoughtan). One
African was listed among the dead at West and Shirley Hundred, in the corporation
of Charles City.

The 1625 muster listed twenty-three Africans and a single Indian, all servants,
who resided on plantations scattered from the mouth of the James to Flowerdew
Hundred. As servants, they probably lived in houses separate from their European
masters. And while the 1625 muster included, for most Europeans, the year in which
they arrived and the ship on which they came, little such information was provided
for Africans. Three male and five female Africans lived in Yeardley's household at
Jamestown; at Flowerdew Hundred, there were four African men, two women, and a
child. An African man named John Pedro lived in the household of Francis West, of Elizabeth City,
and the same Edward from 1624 still lived with Richard Kingsmill at Neck O'Land.
Captain Peirce's female African, Angelo, was said to have come to Virginia on the
Treasurer in 1619. By 1625, Captain Tucker's Anthony and
Isabella, in Elizabeth City, had produced a son, William; all three had been
baptized.

Among the African slaves owned by the Bennett family in 1625 was Antonio (also
listed in 1624), who had arrived on the James in 1621. In
March 1622, he was one of just a handful of people who managed to survive
Opechancanough's attack on the plantation, and he eventually gained his freedom.
At some point, Antonio wed a woman named Mary, who had come to Virginia in 1622 on
the Margaret and John, and the two lived as Anthony and
Mary Johnson in Northampton
County on the Eastern
Shore. There, they raised four children and by the 1650s owned 250 acres
of land. Their two sons owned adjoining farms of 450 and 100 acres each before the
whole family moved to Maryland, in the 1660s. Anthony Johnson's grandson, John
Johnson Jr., purchased a 44-acre farm there in 1677 and named it Angola.

Other Africans began to turn up in Virginia court records. On September 19, 1625,
for instance, the General
Court ordered Captain Nathaniel Bass to provide clothing for an African
man named Brass (or Brase), who had come to Virginia with a Captain Jones and been
sold to Captain Bass. The same decision awarded temporary custody of Brass to Lady Temperance
Flowerdew Yeardley, the wife of Sir George Yeardley and a resident of
Jamestown, who was then ordered to pay forty pounds of good tobacco per month for
his labor "so long as he remayneth with her." It was a decision that both
distinguished between African servitude and slavery, and put a price on the labor
of an African male. On October 3, the court ruled again, this time transferring
Brass to the custody of Governor Francis Wyatt and voiding the original sale Captain Jones had made to
Captain Bass.

By 1628, the African population in Virginia jumped dramatically when the ship Fortune, out of Massachusetts Bay, captured a Spanish slaver
carrying about 100 Angolans, whom the captain sold in Virginia for tobacco. A
muster planned for 1629 either did not take place or the records did not
survive.

Contributions

Many of the Africans brought to Virginia
during the seventeenth century, like the urban dwellers of Ndongo, had led lives
far from the fields and of some social distinction. Others, however, carried with
them a specialized knowledge of agriculture and of tobacco production in
particular. The Portuguese had introduced the crop to West and West Central Africa
during the 1500s. Africans readily took to the habit of smoking and, over time,
the practice gradually spread. In 1607, an English visitor to Sierra Leone noticed
that it was planted near most of the houses. In 1620, another Englishman
encountered people near the Gambia River who offered to trade tobacco and pipes
for English goods. In Senegambia, women often raised tobacco in small family
plots, while men typically grew large plots intended for trade. Tobacco was
planted on the floodplain, after the corn harvest, and Africans knew that its
characteristics depended on the soil in which it grew.

The Africans' method of tilling the ground also readily transferred to Virginia.
In West Africa, farmers practiced the same hoe-and-hill method of growing corn and
tobacco that the early colonists had learned from the Indians. John Barbot,
traveling in West Africa about 1680, noted that "two [African] men will dig as
much land in a day, as one plow can turn over in England." Although tobacco and
corn were not staple crops in West Africa, most African immigrants knew how to
raise them. Their knowledge and skill would have been invaluable to Tidewater planters.

Many of northern Senegambia's inhabitants were nomads who tended wandering herds
of foraging livestock, usually cattle, sheep, and goats. Farther south, where rain
was more abundant, settled people raised poultry and grew peas, beans, peanuts,
rice, millet, sweet potatoes, cotton, and indigo. Others worked as fishermen,
potters, weavers, blacksmiths, and leather-dressers, all skills that Virginia's
first Africans contributed, against their will, to the colony.

Time Line

1618–1619
- Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos, governor of the Portuguese colony of Angola, in West Central Africa, leads campaigns against the kingdom of Ndongo, capturing thousands. These Africans likely provided the cargo for six slave ships from Angola that arrived in Mexico from June 1619 until June 1620.

1619
- Sometime in the first half of the year, the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista leaves the port city of São Paulo de Loanda in Portugal's West African colony of Angola and sails for Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico). It carries a cargo of 350 African slaves.

July–August 1619
- Two English ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer, both sailing out of Flushing, Holland, intercept the Portuguese slaver São João Bautista off the coast of Campeche in present-day Mexico. After stealing fifty or so slaves, the ships sail to Virginia with the intention of selling them.

Late August 1619
- The White Lion, captained by John Colyn Jope, arrives at Point Comfort, where Jope sells "20. and odd Negroes" in exchange for food. These are the first Africans to enter the Virginia colony. Four days later, the Treasurer arrives and sells an unknown number of its slaves.

August 30, 1619
- Manuel Mendes da Cunha, captain of the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista, arrives in Vera Cruz, New Spain (present-day Mexico), with only 147 slaves. He left Angola in West Central Africa with 350, but some were stolen off the coast of Campeche and transported to Virginia for sale. Others probably died en route.

March 1620
- Virginia's first muster, or census, is compiled and lists 892 Europeans and, among "Others not Christians in the Service of the English," four Indians and thirty-two Africans. Fifteen of the Africans are male and seventeen are female.

1621
- An enslaved African named Antonio arrives in Virginia aboard the James. The following March, he will be one of only a handful of people who manage to survive an Indian attack on the plantation of Edward Bennett.

1622
- An enslaved African woman named Mary arrives in Virginia aboard the Margaret and John.

February 1624
- The population of Europeans in the Virginia colony is 906. A muster, or census, lists twenty-one Africans, down from thirty-two in 1620. Twelve of the Africans are identified by name, suggesting they have been baptized.

January 20–February 7, 1625
- The population of Europeans in the Virginia colony is 1,232. A muster, or census, lists twenty-three Africans and one Indian, all of them servants. They live on plantations scattered from the mouth of the James River to Flowerdew Hundred.

September 19, 1625
- The General Court orders Captain Nathaniel Bass to provide clothing to an African man named Brass, whom he had bought from a Captain Jones. The same decision awards temporary custody of Brass to Lady Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley, who is ordered to pay forty pounds of good tobacco per month for his labor.

October 3, 1625
- The General Court revisits its ruling from September 19, transferring custody of an African man named Brass from Lady Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley to Governor Francis Wyatt. The court also voids the original sale of Brass by a Captain Jones to Captain Nathaniel Bass.

1628
- The African population in Virginia rises dramatically when the ship Fortune, out of Massachusetts Bay, captures a Spanish slaver carrying about 100 Angolans, whom the captain sells in Virginia for tobacco.

1650s
- By this time, Anthony and Mary Johnson, two former slaves, are living in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore, where they own 250 acres. Their two sons own adjoining farms of 450 and 100 acres each.

1660s
- Anthony and Mary Johnson, both former slaves, and their two sons, all of whom own land on the Eastern Shore, move to Maryland.

1677
- John Johnson Jr., whose grandfather Anthony was a Virginia slave who bought his freedom, buys a forty-four-acre farm in Maryland and names it Angola, suggesting the origin of his family.

References

Further Reading

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1998.

Heywood, Linda M. and John K. Thornton. Central Africans,
Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Mariners' Museum. Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave
Trade and the Making of the Americas. Newport News, Virginia, and
Washington, D.C.: The Mariners Museum and the Smithsonian Institution,
2002.